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About this site
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This section's edited by Hylton Jolliffe, the founder, editor and publisher of Corante.
Up for inclusion: anything on the culture, technology, politics, and future of blogs. Please send any tips, suggestions or reactions to Hylton.
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CORANTE ON BLOGGING: In media res
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By Hylton Jolliffe
Steven Johnson draws a comparison between urban design and blogging: "The blogosphere is the closest thing going to the short blocks neighborhood." Which is, he concludes, "a very human scale... it opens you up to new perspectives, but doesn't overwhelm you at the same time." |
Josh Marshall comments, in a Guardian article, on an aspect of the press that played a role in the attention they initially gave, or didn't, Trent Lott's remarks: "The way daily journalism works, a story has a 24-hour audition to see if it has legs, and if it doesn't get picked up, that's it." |
Elizabeth Osder says, in an article by Noah Shachtman, that bloggers are navel-gazers and that as such "they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books." |
Harold Gilchrist, who's just launched a blog on moblogging, says that "as we enhance our online connectivity beyond our computers and notebooks, the need to instantly communicate with our weblogs becomes important." |
Jeff Ward, who also likens blog discourse to the show-and-tell of kindergarten, says that "link heavy blogs create persona through a process of selection, of valuation," and adds that "it takes guts to put yourself out on the commons without any trinkets to sell." |
Shelley Powers on Chris Locke's new Corante blog: "I'm glad the ransom worked and my sweetie's been returned... We can now fire the Chris Locke stunt double, and send him back to the jungle."
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Adina Levin points to her father's Holocaust experience as one of the reasons she blogs: "One of the questions that I had about approaching adulthood was -- if the place that I lived started sliding toward totalitarianism, would I be one of the people who spoke up... this is one small thing that I can do to help make people aware." |
Salon, in a story on the otherwise forgettable year in tech, on the rise of the blogosphere: "The political intelligentsia... began to accept the notion that new ideas, valuable dialogue and even original news could bubble up from this newly democratized "chattering class." |
Tom Shugart: "For me, and I'm sure for many others, [blogging is] a welcome opportunity for re-invention--a pathway to the true self that one's demons have prevented one from expressing in the 'real' world." |
Cynthia Webb says, in the Washington Post, that 2002 was "the year when blogging caught the eye of the mainstream press in a big way and pundits began to recognize blogs as useful tools for everything from venting about politics to raving about a favorite band."
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Some Corante news: A new blog from none other than Chris Locke. Called Ad Hominem, it will, as Chris puts it, "include an eclectic range of observations drawn from personal experience. On business in general: the good, the bad and the butt ugly. On marketing in specific: potshots at the ongoing confusion between broadcast and networked media, along with up-sleeve snickers at missed opportunities and barely warranted optimism about the potential still unsuspected by klueless korporations. On technology: when it helps, where it hurts, and for better or worse, what it's doing to us. On the Internet: historical context, current trends, and shot-in-the-dark stabs at an emerging sociology of networked communities. Plus other unclassifiable stuff as the spirit moves me."
We're thrilled, if a tad nervous :), to have him aboard and hope he'll prove his usual provocative self.
Today's crop: "What we are seeing today on the web -- discounting the plethora of corporate spew -- is the emergence of ourselves as human beings discovering what it means to be human. If you're not doing that, do it. Spook yourself. If you're already spooked, don't quit now. We've only begun to scratch the surface."
He continues: "Why is the net getting so much pushback from the top-down hierarchies of power that freak if they can't control everything. Because it's working, that's why. We're giving ourselves permission to be outlaws."
Check it out! |
Sebastian Paquet, in an comprehensive essay on blogging, comments on the how the best rises to the top of the blogosphere: "Although it is true that there is no review process prior to publishing, one definitely occurs immediately after publication... As people read others' weblogs, they link selectively to the content that they find interesting."
A follow-up point he makes about quality: "The other factor that helps quality emerge in weblogs is personal ownership. Although webloggers participate in a community, the contents of a weblog is not a communal space; it is under the sole responsibility of its editor." |
Larry Lessig's advice to those looking to voice their opinions on copyright issues? Write your congressperson. But also: Blog. "We've got to develop a rich and serious alternative mode of addressing these issues that's sometimes outside of the control of existing media." |
John Hiler posts again on emergence, saying there's one big difference between ants and bloggers: "In the ant simulation, there were no new food sources. But in the blogosphere, content sites (and increasingly, weblogs) are constantly providing fresh articles to consume. It's this constant source of food which replenishes the blogosphere and supports so much blogging." |
Edward Felten: "One of the apparent themes this week is the Conspiracy to Silence Donna Wentworth... So if Donna starts acting a bit paranoid, let's take it easy on her."
Donna's response: "Something rather wonderful about writing a blog: if ever you run into trouble, it's not at all uncommon to discover that you've got someone--or two--out there watching your back." |
Chris Willis of Hypergene, who reports he's just taken a real job he got in part due to his writing on blogs: "Perhaps I’ve been trying to convince the wrong people about collaborative media. As far as I can tell, it’s not the news organizations that are interested in participation - it’s everyone else." |
Jeff Jarvis on the "video blogging" (vlogging?) he's begun: "There's no reason a blogger could not be a new-age TV anchor, for TV news is really just a weblog with pictures that move and talk: TV news links to the same video everyone else has (news being a commodity today) with a talking head tying it all together." |
Nick Denton says, after noting how the "MeFites" reacted to the launch of Gawker, that for "unintended humor, there's nothing better than Metafilter... they're apparently entirely incapable of recognizing irony, detecting a spoof, or realizing that they're taking their Metafilter life far too seriously." |
Kevin Werbach after losing his blog's archives (they were mostly recovered later): "It felt as though someone stole my wedding album."
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David Weinberger: "The great virtue of blogs is that they're understood to be perpetual rough drafts." |
John Hiler touches on emergent systems and reveals he's not ant-like in personality but says acting like one "might be a fun experiment." His point: "Good bloggers are like ants: they work hard to find news, and then they drop weblog-pheromones so that other bloggers can get in on the action." |
Tina Brown calls bloggers the "opinion samurai of the internet," adding that Adam Gopnik "has been proved right in his often-voiced prediction that the internet would be less an amazing instrument of information than the ideal medium for opinion, endlessly revised and delivered in short bursts."
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Staci Kramer calls blogs a "perfect incubator" for tipping the Trent Lott coverage but adds that it's a bit more complicated than the "romantic" version of the story which has the blogs "beating the drums until the media was forced to pick up the rhythm." |
Duane Freese writes in Tech Central Station that "perhaps the most important element of the Lott story is the way in which conservatives used the Net and new media in order to hold a leader to account - something that would have been impossible just a few years ago." |
Andrew Sullivan reports that his one-week fundraising drive has garnered nearly $80,000 so far from 3,339 people: "It's not exactly venture-capitalism but it's a great start." |
Jennifer Balderama reports, for the Washington Post, on the legal problems bloggers may encounter: "Many people publish as if they were untouchable, assuming that because what they write appears in a virtual world, it won't come back to burn them in the 'real' world." |
Nick Denton announces his latest blog venture Gawker: "a live review of city news, and by news we mean, among other things, urban dating rituals, no-ropes social climbing, Condé Nastiness, downwardly-mobile i-bankers, real estate porn -- the serious stuff."
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John Hiler points to 25-year-old comments from Warren Buffett on the fragmentation of the media industry and says: "Blogs are the latest media format making the media business even tougher... They're lean and mean - and they tend to breed a fierce loyalty from their readers that takes years for a magazine to achieve." |
Jenny Levine on something that's of concern to me since Edward Felten tipped us off to it last night - the fact that CyberPatrol's deemed our entire site unfit for viewing: "Why on earth would the Corante sites be blocked?" [Donna hints at what may be afoot.] |
Alex Golub says that blogs have a unique format best described as "punchy": "You have enough time to get in, make your point, and get out again... [they're all] topic sentences and no supporting evidence, god bless 'em."
And, he continues, it's this "flare-up-and-fade-away aspect" that is "what makes them so great and inspires such thought." |
Santa Claus: "Everyone’s got a blog these days, why not me? I really need someone to vent to, and when you’re stuck up in this frozen tundra all year long with no one but a bitter wife and a bunch of midgets to talk to, you end up with a lot of pent-up aggression." |
The Questioning Ant, the creation of Grumpygirl, continues its ruminations on the blogging phenomenon: "I'm realising that humans are more like ants than we initially thought. Despite the fact that they insist on seeing themselves as individuals, on the whole, they function best when living within communities." |
Jeneane Sessum, who says her archives are becoming increasingly important to her: "I don't want my archives to be just chronological; I want them to represent who I was, where I was, why I was, while I was writing. To be my living brain, my living heart, tracing back into the me I was so that I can learn more about the me I'm becoming." |
Jill Walker on the use of comments on her site: "It's kind of like letting people scribble in the margins of what you write. You can rub it out if you don't like it... but mostly, it's rather nice. It's social. It's open." |
Peter Merholz on online publishing, and academic journal publishing in particular: "One of the amazing things about the Web -- it's breaking down barriers between academia and 'the interested in layperson.'"
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Joi Ito: "One of the greatest things about blogs is that they are not being developed by huge evil companies, but by individuals who are members of a community..."
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Glenn Reynolds on the Trent Lott story in the Washington Post: "The guy's majority leader. Reporters, as opposed to bloggers, depend on him for access. The hinterlands are full of bloggers who don't care whether Trent Lott is nice to them or not. That makes them different from the Washington press." |
Cameron Marlow, the creator of Blogdex, in an interview with Kiruba Shankar on his Ph.D. work: "Some time over the course of writing my master's thesis I realized that a large part of our intelligence is derived from our social interaction... Blogdex is a platform for studying the evolution of information as it spreads through a social network." |
Jesse James Garrett's take on the role bloggers played in calling attention to Trent Lott's record: "Big Media... wouldn't have been paying attention were it not for a few of their own who happened to also keep weblogs. That's not a grassroots movement grabbing attention -- it's slumming professionals co-opting an amateur form."
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Christian Crumlish on Blogs vs. Lott: "Are we now seeing a similar stirring from the left, a late-blooming awareness that we (that is, anyone) can set the agenda without waiting for the imprimatur of the powers that be?"
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Chris Gulker, in reporting on a dinner organized by Dave Winer during Supernova: "It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between the meteoric rise of blogging... and the rise of unemployment in Silicon Valley and other tech corridors."
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Adina Levin, in a review of David Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," says, "we've been living with a wierd anomaly for the last century or so in which culture has been mass-produced and distributed via mass media... The internet brings back ancient traditions of humans working and playing together to tell stories and make our culture." |
Eric Norlin rants: "There seems to be this highly vocal contingent of bloggers. Oh they're nice enough — until you offend their smarmy, alan alda/gloria steinem/woodstockian sensibilities." |
Scott Kirsner, who says there's no one hot trend in technology, points his audience to a number of tech luminaries' blogs, and in doing so captures the essence of what can make blogs so compelling: "All... work in the tech sector, read (and surf) voraciously [and] are supremely well-connected..." |
John Scalzi, who sees nothing unseemly about Andrew Sullivan's fundraising: "I f the man doesn't get paid for his writing, he doesn't eat. If he can get some portion his audience to support the blog he enjoys writing and they enjoy reading, more power to him."
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Joshua Marshall, who with several other bloggers has been credited with getting big media to pay attention to Trent Lott's bigotry: "What was most remarkable about the scandal enveloping him was how long it took before the press took much notice of it." |
Andrew Sullivan provides an update on the fund raiser he's launched to help him continue his blogging: "It's been a huge success."
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John Podhoretz: "There's nothing more exciting than watching a new medium mature before your eyes... If Lott is forced to resign as Senate majority leader, which is devoutly to be wished, credit must go to the blogosphere."
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Andrew Sullivan cites a letter he's received which credits blogs with calling attention to Trent Lott's history of bigotry: "The blogs give legitimacy to the other papers. They create the momentum, and the big boys can jump on. Do you think that the NY Times would be running articles on this if InstaPundit had not?"
It continues: "I have been a fan of blogs for a while now, but I have not seen a story happen around the edges of the major media like this one has... this could be a watershed moment for the world of blogging." |
Paul Krugman thanks Joshua Marshall, whose site he has mentioned several times over the past few months, in his op-ed column for the New York Times today: "TalkingPointsMemo.com is must reading for the politically curious... more than anyone else [Marshall] is responsible for making Trent Lott's offensive remarks the issue they deserve to be." |
Scott Rosenberg on the hot topics in tech discussed at Supernova: "The danger here is that the dynamo of the Silicon Valley boom-bust cycle, in its hunger for Next Big Thing fuel, will seize upon Wi-Fi, blogs and Web services and then spit them out, chewed-up and spent -- before they've ever had a chance to mature and show off their potential." |
Jane Perrone for the The Guardian: "Moblogs remain in the domain of those with the grasp of technology and the disposable income to make them work - one might call them upwardly mobile geeks."
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Beth Goza, who The Register picked on a few months ago, announces she's blogging again: "all the other web bloggers and web people really love me. they love me!"
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Tim O'Reilly, in an important essay on piracy and the distribution of content: "The question before us is not whether technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage new technologies to increase the visibility of their work." |
Mitch Ratcliffe asks, as reported by Doc Searls: "Will the Web be a medium be a expression or interaction? Will the edge matter more than the center?" Dave Winer's reponse: "Yes."
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Doc Searls reports on Supernova, decentralization, and web services: "Audience members were reporting the panel, live, on their weblogs... Clues proliferated at the speed of packet traffic. Cluelessness was widely exposed, and corrected, just as fast, all thanks to real live web services."
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A.K.M. Adam: "[The] possibility of encountering an unexpected specialness is part of what enchants many of us about the Web in general and blogging in particular."
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Michael O'Connor Clarke on blogging: "[It] is about 7 parts drip-fed cathartic release mixed in with the occasional head-spinning moments of monster ego-woody." |
Jeff Jarvis sticks up for the few "wise moguls" of the big media industry from which he hails: "[They are] recognizing that the audience is producing content in new (and cheaper!) ways that will benefit everyone (if in no other way than providing competition to the expensive and often unionized producers who are working for the big media companies now)." |
Steven Johnson says, says of the pounding the blogosphere's been giving Trent Lott over his pro-segregation comments: "It's like a journalistic flotation device: the blogosphere can pump air back into a story that's starting to sink, and when it bobs back up to the surface again, big media has to pay attention." |
Nick Denton: "With the profusion of Blogdex clones, it's only a matter of time before a meta-index emerges, rating which Blogdex came first, which is the most popular, and which is spreading most rapidly."
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Arnold Kling says, of Edge Media, that "the entertainment industry is determined to treat edge power as a bug, not a feature" instead of "trying to have Edge Power working for them rather than against them."
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Jeff Jarvis on Sullivan's "begging": "This is why I prefer capitalism. When a magazine or newspaper dies, it just dies. It doesn't wimper and beg and moan and whine and try to make you feel guilty for its pain..."
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Andrew Sullivan, cited by some over the past year as an example of how bloggers could make money: "As old-timers at the site know, we've been trying to find a way to make this site economically sustainable for a long time. It hasn't been easy..."
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Rick Bruner: "A new trend would seem to be afoot. In the last week or so, three bloggers I often read -- Nick Denton, Elizabeth Spiers and Jeff Jarvis -- have all put new photos of themselves up on their blogs... Is there no mystery left in the blogosphere?"
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Denise Howell presents a list of ten telltale signs of addiction to blogging - #3: "You are familiar with the Meg and Jason story." #6: "You have given presentations to your co-workers about the uses and benefits of weblogs." #9: "You are grinding on a brief -- and still blogging."
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Doc Searls on all the real-time blogging going on at Supernova 2002: " Sounds like it's raining. Everybody's typing. It's like we've got a room full of court stenographers."
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Howard Rheingold, in an interview with Corante, says of the conflict between vested interests and open systems: "Social filtering of the kind we see with blogging is an early sign that large numbers of people are still interested in participating in a non-zero-sum game." |
[OK, we're live now with Howard Rheingold answering questions we've put to him, and hopefully you will too in the next few days, in Buzz, our new section in which we're highlighting interesting books.] |
Jeff Jarvis offers up, "as a public service to generous (and greedy) bloggers everywhere," a "catalogue of blog booty" - an annotated list of books, products, and other goodies created by bloggers.
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Dan Gillmor, who's writing a book about the future of media, on John Hiler's Cityblogs: "I believe John is right that local coverage is a natural outlet for blogs... This is potentially a breakthrough, and I'll be watching with great interest."
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Tom Matrullo, prompted by Cityblogs, ponders what else blogging could be applied to: "Blog + ________ = potential new functionalities, relations of micro-content to communities to networks."
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Michael Hall, in writing about Doc Searls, blogging, and Google, asks: "Is this obsession with Google placement the result of special understandings by a canny early mover in the blogosphere?" |
Doc Searls, in article for Linux Journal on the nature of blogs and the technology that underpins them: "I see my blog as a kind of fireplace. Each post is a log I throw on top of the fire to keep it burning."
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Shelley Powers cites a David Weinberger line: "'We are writing ourselves into existence,' only lasts until it reaches the barrier of the real world, and we realize that each of us is a three-dimensional person who existed before weblogging." |
Madeleine Begun Kane, blogger, poet, and humorist, on the Little Green Footballs anti-linking brouhaha kicked off by Jim Capozzola: "Shall we LGF de-link? 'Tis a quandary I think. Is there a censorship stink? Is Capozzola just a fink?" |
Jeff Jarvis on why the blogosphere may lean to the right: "[It's] more fun, more entertaining. And besides, everybody loves kicking the serious, wimpy, 98-pound-weakling, do-gooder, simp (read: Al Gore), especially when he's down. It's sport."
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JD Lasica on Cityblogs: "[I] immediately fell in love with[it]... No highly paid entertainment journalists. No freelancers. No staffs of listings editors. Just bloggers writing for the love of it, and the cachet of contributing to a high-profile site."
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Glenn Reynolds, who says alternative weeklies are in danger of extinction, on John Hiler's Cityblogs: "On of the main reasons people pick up free alt-weeklies is for the entertainment listings and quirky local coverage -- and that's something that blogs can do better than once-a-week publications with print-level overhead." |
John Hiler, who's just launched Cityblogs, notes that though local sites are much loved by users, they cost too much to run: "It's a Gordian knot - hire expensive writers or you have no content - that blogs are uniquely positioned to cut in two." |
Jon Udell comments on power law distribution and its implications for bloggers: "There is a kind of naive egalitarian notion that because links are free and everything is connected, all nodes are created equal. In fact, although it apparently never occurred to early network theorists, nothing could be further from the truth."
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The Independent on the future of publishing: "The concept of 'a publication' may be obsolete in the ubiquitous information age... The mass market may soon be impossible to locate."
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Elizabeth Lane Lawley on the "missionary position," some bloggers may have found themselves in over the Thanksgiving break: "So, how many US-based bloggers found themselves evangelizing this medium at the dinner table last night? And of those, how many realized that the people listening to them just weren't getting it..."
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Peter Lindberg, who's been reading up on creativity recently, says he's learning something about his own creative process: "As you write your ideas down, they enter your long-term memory. I have noticed that some ideas linger, that I am forced to return to them; this happens much more often than before I started weblogging." |
Robert X. Cringely says, in an article about the threat of P2P file-sharing to the media business, that "from the perspective of the established publishers, there is... the horrible possibility that people might actually come to prefer material they find for free on the Internet -- not just pirated material, but even original material." |
Edward Felten, of Freedom To Tinker and Princeton, comments on how his blog has enabled a discourse that academic-publishing traditionally doesn't: "I get a surprising number of really good, thoughtful comments from people I've never heard of. I've access to these ideas ... which I never would have had otherwise." |
Renee Hopkins: "I've been thinking of the idea-generating nature of the Internet in general and blogs in particular as a form of 'distributed creativity.' I can see now that that was really a side trip down an alley off the main drag..."
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Jeneane Sessum on the much-discussed Times article in which she was prominently features: "The story yet untold is the one about how the net--blogging quite specifically--is changing relationships among humans--that means men to men, men to women, women to women, women to men, individuals, couples, triples, families, just everything, and I mean everything."
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Tom Matrullo discusses human motivation in trying to understand why blogging's taken off: "Does anybody find media punditry satisfying? Does it account for the power, the mobilization, the sweep, the energies, the scope, the mania of blogging? Whatever is 'behind' blogging, it's larger than what we normally think of as motivation."
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Chris Locke on the New York Times' story the other day on female bloggers: "[It] could have been a watershed document; instead, it comes across as sloppy and confused." |
Nick Denton, who provides proof of a journalist plumbing blogs for good stories: "
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Ad Explanation
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